James' World 2

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During one of several explosive exchanges between Vivek Ramaswamy and his Republican opponents in the first debate of the 2024 presidential-primary season, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie called Ramaswamy an “amateur” who “sounds like Chat GPT.” Ramaswamy met this volley, as well as a cascading chorus of whoops and laughter and “oohs” from the crowd, with an impervious smile and a barb about Christie literally embracing Barack Obama after Hurricane Sandy. The shield of his smile had to be deployed all night long, as his rivals took obvious umbrage at the presence of this rude political neophyte and attacked him with relish — an uncanny replay of the dynamic that governed Donald Trump’s debates in 2016. But nothing could dampen Ramaswamy’s spirit or dim that grin. To borrow a line from FDR, Ramaswamy seemed to be saying to his rivals that he welcomed their hatred.

Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur who muscled and hustled his way from obscurity onto a debate stage that notably did not include the race’s front-runner, Trump, is adept at borrowing lines. Christie’s jab was in part a reference to his robotic, rat-a-tat delivery of aphorisms that resemble a cross between traditional conservative know-nothingism and Elon Musk’s brand of Silicon Valley know-everythingism. (“Fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity!”) But Christie was also calling out Ramaswamy’s naked appropriation of one of Obama’s most famous quotes from the 2008 campaign, with Ramaswamy introducing himself to the Republican faithful in Milwaukee as a “skinny guy with a funny last name.” His crisp hand gestures and tight little head shakes were vintage Obama, yet the words coming out of his mouth were “Reverse racism is racism.” It really did feel like Ramaswamy was a computer program trawling the past two decades of American history to cobble together a ruthless striver’s idea of a political persona, some unholy amalgamation of Obama, Trump, and Musk.

The press has been about as hostile to Ramaswamy as the rest of the Republican field. In a New York Times roundtable after the debate, commentators from across the ideological spectrum described him as “astoundingly arrogant,” “irritating,” “glib,” “smarmy,” “obnoxious,” “a zero,” “preening,” and “completely bananas.” The conservative columnist Bret Stephens said Ramaswamy “seems to think he’s Jesus,” and not in the meek-shall-inherit-the-Earth way. There is a sense in the Establishment media that because Ramaswamy is such a copycat, particularly of Trump, that he represents no broader threat or significance, that he’s just another wannabe swimming in the MAGA slipstream. The Princeton historian Kevin Kruse tweeted, “What’s funny is that Vivek is going to campaign with furious Debate Bro energy for six nonstop months and then Trump will casually refer to him as ‘Rama-smarmy, or whatever’ and he’ll immediately turn to dust.”

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“Astoundingly arrogant,” “irritating,” “glib,” “smarmy,” “obnoxious,” “a zero,” “preening,” and “completely bananas,” according to Times roundtable. But is that what winning looks like now? Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

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Rachel Simmons was raised Catholic and later joined a Presbyterian church, but she told me the closest thing she’s ever had to true religion came from a childhood friendship. When she was in middle school, she and two other kids, Margo Darragh and Sam Lodge, formed “RMS”—a name combining each of their first initials—that elevated their friend group to a sacred entity.

As they approached high school, the girls would sneak out of their rural Pennsylvania homes at night and one would drive the rest on a four-wheeler into a forest on Lodge’s neighbor’s property. Inspired by Warriors, an adventure-book series, the girls divided the forest into four territories, and each girl ruled over one. The shared area in the middle, featuring a creek with large moss-covered rocks, became their ceremonial site. They’d chant, “Leaders of Star Clan, we come to these rocks, to drink, share tongues, and faithfully talk.” They’d divulge their feelings, meditate in silence, and drink a palmful of the creek water.

These ceremonies were just one part of the elaborate set of practices that RMS developed during middle and high school. Others included three-day sleepovers and a secret code language. The three friends essentially created their own culture and, with it, a profound bond.

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Illustration by Ben Hickey

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Researchers hope brain implants will one day help people who have lost the ability to speak to get their voice back—and maybe even to sing. Now, for the first time, scientists have demonstrated that the brain’s electrical activity can be decoded and used to reconstruct music.

A new study analyzed data from 29 people who were already being monitored for epileptic seizures using postage-stamp-size arrays of electrodes that were placed directly on the surface of their brain. As the participants listened to Pink Floyd’s 1979 song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” the electrodes captured the electrical activity of several brain regions attuned to musical elements such as tone, rhythm, harmony, and lyrics. Employing machine learning, the researchers reconstructed garbled but distinctive audio of what the participants were hearing. The study results were published on Tuesday in PLOS Biology.

Neuroscientists have worked for decades to decode what people are seeing, hearing, or thinking from brain activity alone. In 2012 a team that included the new study’s senior author—cognitive neuroscientist Robert Knight of the University of California, Berkeley—became the first to successfully reconstruct audio recordings of words participants heard while wearing implanted electrodes. Others have since used similar techniques to reproduce recently viewed or imagined pictures from participants’ brain scans, including human faces and landscape photographs. But the recent PLOS Biology paper by Knight and his colleagues is the first to suggest that scientists can eavesdrop on the brain to synthesize music.

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Pink Floyd performs on stage at Earl’s Court in London during The Wall Tour on August 6, 1980. Researchers re-created the band’s song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” from listeners’ brain activity. Credit: Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty Images

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Aging isn’t something that only happens to old people. We’re all aging, all the time, as long as we’re alive. Most of us just don’t spend much time thinking about aging unless we’re blowing out birthday candles or reaching specific milestones. Otherwise, it doesn’t typically come up.

Today, aging is a broadening spectrum, according to David Cravit, co-author of SuperAging: Getting Older Without Getting Old. He believes that long-accepted benchmarks — buy a house by 30, gain that promotion by 40, retire and stop working by 65 — no longer apply.

Human beings are living longer and healthier than at any other time in history. Despite a drop in life expectancy during the pandemic, the human lifespan has steadily increased. The number of people living to age 100 nearly doubled over the last two decades. By 2050, there are projected to be more than 3.7 million centenarians worldwide.

As a new longevity becomes the norm, there are fewer time constraints on opportunities. You could break track and field records at 102, run for president at 82, pose in a swimsuit on a magazine cover at 81, or embrace #grandmacore in your 20s.

“The clock keeps ticking, but the spectrum gets pushed further and further, and the end gets compressed,” Cravit says. “It happens later, and it’s shorter. And until it happens, you’re still productive and learning and growing and contributing.”

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Shondaland Staff

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Need to know

You are getting into your car one morning, about to embark on a long drive, and you hear on the radio that there’s heavy traffic along your route. Suddenly, you’re preoccupied by the thought that you are going to get into a terrible car crash.

At work, you’re about to give a presentation to your colleagues. As they quiet down, and you prepare to speak, thoughts about how you’re likely to go completely blank, fumble, or stutter – and how awful that would feel – start to bubble up in your head.

After a week in which your significant other has been keeping to themselves more than usual, paying you little attention, you start to think: Is there something wrong with our relationship? Our relationship must be ending… This is a disaster… In this situation, as in the others, the negative thoughts might be accompanied by physical sensations such as sweating, a racing heartbeat, feeling light-headed and dizzy, or feeling a pit in the stomach.

What do these scenarios have in common? They all illustrate a widespread way of thinking that we can call ‘thinking the worst’. These are just a few possible examples; there are countless other situations in which this sort of thinking could appear. Can you recognize it in some of your own, real-life experiences? We all engage in thinking the worst now and then, especially when going through a particularly stressful time.

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Illustration by Natsumi Chikayasu

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Last month, the American Chemistry Council, a petrochemical industry trade group, sent out a newsletter highlighting a major new report on what it presented as a promising solution to the plastic pollution crisis: using “recycled” plastic in construction materials. At first blush, it might seem like a pretty good idea — shred discarded plastic into tiny pieces, and you can reprocess it into everything from roads and bridges to railroad ties. Many test projects have been completed in recent years, with proponents touting them as a convenient way to divert plastic waste from landfills while also making infrastructure lighter, more rot-resistant, or, ostensibly, more durable.

“As our nation sets about rebuilding our infrastructure and restoring our resilience, plastic will play an outsized role,” the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, a petrochemical industry trade group, says on one of its websites.

But independent experts tell a much more complicated story, suggesting that most applications involving plastic waste in infrastructure are not ready for prime time. In recent years, several reports and literature reviews have highlighted the unknown health and environmental impacts of repurposing plastic into construction materials. They’ve also warned that post-consumer plastic isn’t desirable for use in many types of infrastructure — and that diverting plastic into construction is unlikely to make much of a dent in the massive tide of plastic waste that the developed world produces. To the contrary, adding used plastic to construction materials could even incentivize more plastic production.  

Take a closer look at the 407-page National Academies of Sciences report the ACC highlighted in its newsletter, for example, and you’ll find that it said there has been virtually “no significant research” in the United States to back claims about the benefits of using plastic in roads. Other construction applications face “high material and installation costs,” as well as “uncertainties about long-term performance and environmental impact.”

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Workers lay down asphalt infused with plastic waste on a roadway in Turin, Italy. Stefano Guidi / Getty Images

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